By Linda Forrest
I can’t help but share what I think is a brilliant PR campaign by Dr. Pepper. The company has agreed to give every person in America, except for Slash and Buckethead, two guitarists who have famously quit working with Axl Rose in various incarnations of the band Guns ‘n Roses, a free can of Dr. Pepper if the band, such as it is, puts out its long awaited album Chinese Democracy before the calendar year is through.
A little history on Chinese Democracy. It has been in production, supposedly, since the early 1990s. Every six months or so, Axl Rose says that it’s just about complete and that it will be released shortly. Then, some sort of internal strife or label struggle causes an incalculable setback and the album never comes out. Suffice to say that since Bill Clinton had just entered office when production began, Americans will have to find other ways to quench their thirst as it’s improbable, to say the least, that 2008 will be the year that the fabled album makes an appearance.
Okay, so it has little to do with B2B PR, but it is nonetheless a terrific strategy that’s circumventing a lot of the gatekeepers and barriers to coverage that would traditionally exist for a corporate behemoth like Cadbury Schweppes in reaching its target demographic of males 18-34. Kudos to Ketchum for developing and executing this creative campaign.
The tenuous connection between inmedia and a music-themed PR campaign is that in a former life, I worked in public relations for a variety of record labels and recording artists. For those of you playing the six degrees of separation game, I’m the link here, folks.
